A common problem with Befunge is the (efficient) representation of big numbers. (= putting a number on the stack with the least amount of instructions)
BefunRep is a commandline tool to generate a list of representations for all numbers in a specified range. I'm pretty sure the calculation of the optimal representation is a NP complete. But BefunRep tries to to find good representations for all numbers via various algorithms. And it does a pretty good job. It finds for all the numbers between -1 million and +1 million representations with a maximum of eleven characters.
(you can access an example dataset online with this webpage)
Here an example call to BefunRep:
> BefunRep.exe -lower=0 -upper=1000 -iterations=3 -stats=3 -q -safe="safe.bin" -out="out.csv" -reset
This calculates the numbers from 0 to 1000.
With a maximum of 3 iterations (use -1 to calculate until no more improvmenets can be found)
Safe the results in binary format in the file safe.bin
If the safe already exists it will be reseted (-reset)
And exports the results readable to out.csv
You can also update an existing safe
> BefunRep.exe -safe="safe.bin" -iterations=-1
Or don't calculate anything and only output an existing safe into another format
> BefunRep.exe -safe="safe.bin" -iterations=0 -stats=3 -out="out.json"
Here an example of a few calculated values:
| Number | Representation |
|---|---|
| 113564 | "tY!"**3/ |
| 113565 | "qC-"**3/ |
| 113566 | "[' "**2- |
| 113567 | "[' "**1- |
| 113568 | "[' "** |
| 113569 | "~~U"++:* |
| 113570 | "[' "**2+ |
| 113571 | "wj"*5+9* |
| 113572 | "[' "**4+ |
| 113573 | "[' "**5+ |
| 113574 | "E~(&"*+* |
I uploaded an collection of all representations from 0 to 2^24 to a githup repository - in case you need to look up a few numbers
You can easily access the Befunge_Number_Representations repository with this online terminal: http://mikescher.github.io/Befunge_Number_Representations/
You can download the binaries from my website www.mikescher.com
Or you can get the latest Github release (In case AppVeyor is down)
Or you can download the latest (nightly) version from the AppVeyor build server
This program was developed under Windows with Visual Studio.
You don't need other BefunUtils projects to run this.
Theoretically you can only clone this repository and run it.
But it could be useful to get the whole BefunUtils solution like described here
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| lower | The lower bound for generation (will be retrieved automatically when an existing safe file is provided) |
| upper | The upper bound for generation |
| notest | Don't automatically test generated code |
| quiet | Don't output every improvement to the console/log |
| reset | Reset the current safe file |
| algorithm | Only use one specific algorithm |
| safe | The safe file to use (or create a new one if the file does not exist) |
| out | The output file, specify the format via the file extension (csv, json, xml). If this is not set no output file will be generated |
| iterations | The amount of iteratoins the program will run (0 won't generate new numbers and -1 will run until there are no more improvements to be made) |
| stats | The amount of statistics to display at the end |
| log | The log file where every console output is logged. This can either be a file or a directory. |
| maxoutput | The maximum number of numbers in a single output file before it is split into multiple files. |
| help | Show the summary of all commands |
Yes, please